1. Field of the Invention
The invention concerns accessing Web pages, such as over the Internet, and more particularly concerns determining the progress of the Web page downloading.
2. Related Art
In recent years use of the Internet has become increasingly widespread. The name, “Internet,” derives from reference to a collection of interconnected networks. The networks of the Internet include dissimilar networks interconnected by gateways that handle data transfer. These gateways convert messages among networks so that they conform to a common TCP/IP suite of protocols.
The World Wide Web (“WWW” or simply “Web”) is an environment for transferring data over the Internet that is widely used and compatible with TCP/IP. In the Web environment, servers and clients transfer data including text, still graphic images, audio, video, etc. using a hypertext transfer protocol (“HTTP”).
A document in the Web environment, also referred to as a “Web Page,” is formatted according to a hypertext markup language (“HTML”) which defines the syntax and placement of special, embedded directions. These embedded directions are not themselves ordinarily displayed, but rather specify how a browser will present the HTML document to a user. The directions also specify how objects such as still graphic images, audio, video, etc. are included in the document, and how the document is linked (also “hyperlinked”) to other documents. Each HTML document is identified by a Uniform Resource Locator (“URL”) which defines a communications path to the document. Thus, if a first document refers to a second document, the first document has an embedded link that includes the second document's URL which the browser knows how to interpret in order to retrieve the second document.
In many cases the objects included in a Web Page are large. Consequently the Web Page together with its included objects can take a long time to download to a user's client from an Internet server, particularly if the bandwidth of the Internet connection is low. Even with a fast server and a fast connection between a client and the Web Page's server, downloading may still be slow if the Web Page has objects located on other servers, as is often the case. This problem of downloading speed is made still worse because the user does not have complete information about how long it will take to download a Web Page. Current browsers provide some information, but not enough.
FIG. 1 illustrates downloading of a Web Page 105 for presentation on a display 120 of a client by a current browser, according to the prior art. The Web page 105 has a number of tags 110.1, 110.2 and 110.3 that refer to respective objects 112.1, 112.2 and 112.3. The objects 112.1, etc. may be still graphic images, movie clips, audio clips, applets, text files, etc. although the Web page 105 may reside on one server and the objects 112.1, etc. may reside on other servers, these objects are referred to as “inclusions” in the parlance of HTML because they are in a sense included in the Web Page 105. That is, when the browser in the client retrieves the Web page 105 and renders it for presentation in a browser window 130 on client display 120, the browser also retrieves the objects 112.1, etc. referred to by the tags 110.1, etc. and includes the objects 112.1, etc. in the window 130 as well.
Information presented to the user is rather limited in connection with downloading Web Page 105. With the browser window 130 open, status bar 135 is visible at the bottom of the window 130. The status bar 135 displays small text messages (not shown) identifying objects as they're being accessed, and to the right of those small text messages the status bar 135 graphically displays an object progress bar 137 which indicates progress in downloading respective objects as the objects are downloaded. While this does provide some information to the user about download progress its value is quite limited, since the user does not have information about how many objects are included in the Web Page 105, or the size of the objects. Furthermore, if the browser window 130 is obscured by an open window for another application on the desktop 125 even the limited information provided by the object progress bar 137 may be obscured. Also, if the browser window 130 is minimized the object progress bar 137 is likewise obscured. A program bar 145 remains visible for the minimized window 130 in the desktop 125 task bar 140, but the program bar 145 does not provide information about download progress.
From the foregoing it should be appreciated that a need exists to present users with more information about progress in downloading a Web Page.